Product & Startup Builder

It's not enough for me to be part of something, it also needs to be part of me.

Added on by Chris Saad.

Esteban Contreras’ wrote…

“Which one are you?

"all employees in a company fall on a spectrum.

On one side, there is the employee who thinks of the company like a job. They come in, they work hard, and they do their job. Some excel at doing their job. But ultimately, it’s a job. They want to make sure they’re fairly compensated for their work, and have interesting projects to pursue. As long as they believe those things are in balance and the arbitrage they can get by going to another company is within a certain bound, they’re stable and stay. In summary, they are rational actors, and the value they add to the company, while valuable, scales linearly.

The other side of the spectrum has a different DNA — they act more like founders than employees. They pour their passion into the company because they believe in its mission and it is how they are wired. They ask and do what is best for the company, not just what is in their job description. They work hard and late, because for them, the company isn’t a job, it is part of their identity. Most of all, they best embody the company’s values, and because they do, their value is not linear: they energize and power startup teams through good times and bad. I think of this class of people as the mitochondria in hypergrowth startups.")

The second one.

It's not enough for me to be part of something, it also needs to be part of me.

Originally posted on Facebook


It will take decades to solve the women in tech problem. Let's work harder.

Added on by Chris Saad.

Tragic result from Stack Overflow yearly survey. Gender of engineers in their community is 7.6% women.

At the risk of stepping on a land mine, I've heard people get upset when the issue is described as a 'pipeline problem'. But I'm not sure how else to read these numbers. The engineers aren't out there. We need to collectively do a better job of fostering women in tech from cradle to ceo.

This will take a long time. It took decades to create this problem and it will create decades to fix. Let's redouble our efforts.

Read the whole report at https://stackoverflow.com/insights/survey/2017/

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The essence of Innovation

Added on by Chris Saad.

“Innovation” is just a fancy word for “stop going with historic inertia and be ready, willing and able to rethink how things are done through the lenses of modern conditions, sensibilities and technologies — at speed and at scale”

Innovation starts with innovative thinking.  Innovative thinking begins with just a few things:

  1. First principles thinking

  2. Lateral thinking

  3. Abundance thinking

It shouldn’t just be done in a lab or in a skunkworks — it should be done by every employee, in every department, every day.

Vivid news stories that fail to capture the truth

Added on by Chris Saad.

For the want of a leather jacket, is Uber lost?

Kara is such great writer. So vivid. Sadly I'm never going to be able to read news or comment threads again without knowing just how much speculation and false assumptions go into them. How little regard for the basic details and the hard, earnest work of the people involved. How easy it is to cheer or jeer from the sidelines while people are in the arena trying their hardest to do good work.

All basically in service of telling a compelling story and getting clicks.

Originally posted on Facebook